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27
Mar 23

Big cats and a lot of music

Our friend Sally Ann came up from Nashville this weekend. She brought an agenda, and I am pleased to report that each of the items on it were discussed. No one entered new business in a Robert’s Rules of Order sort of way because, honestly, it was nerdy enough.

Every now and then I do some obscure Robert Rules of Order thing in the hopes that someone will call me on it, so I can walk into my home library, pull my tattered edition — the August 1986, 17th printing of Jove Books’ edition — of Robert’s Rules off the third shelf of my first book case and point to to the appropriate passage.

I made it to the state finals in a parliamentary contest in high school, because I knew how to have fun.

Anyway, I’m feeling much better, thanks. Feel just like myself, in fact, except for the cough that won’t quit.

On Sunday afternoon we took Sally Ann to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, which is about an hour away. This was our third trip, and her first, and it’s still a great time. Also, you can get a few nice pictures.

This is Tiger Lilly … or Tiger Jilly. I can’t yet tell them apart. They are sisters, and they live in the same giant enclosure. They came to the rescue by way of an Amish farmer who owned a roadside zoo. He had to find them a new home in 2017, and they’re now the first big stars of the walking tour.

This lion is Cera. She’s from Pennsylvania, where a vet there had an exotic animal rescue center, but he got to a point where he physically couldn’t take care of the animals there, so several of them are at EFRC now.

I think this was Jade. I didn’t take careful note of the enclosures this time. It had rained recently and I was trying to avoid the mud. Let’s assume I have that right: Jade and nine other cats came here from an Oklahoma traveling animal show in 2009 when the Okie lost his federal licenses.

All of the cats here are here to stay. They’re well-cared for, regularly attended and live in carefully planned
spaces. Over the years, EFRC, one of just a few such places in the country, has cared for more than a dozen different species. Today, more than 100 big and small exotic cats, are living out their lives there.

Rocky has been here since 2008. His owners lost their license, and he’s been here ever since, always watching the people passing by.

You think “Cute!” But these guys are all thinking, “If this fence wasn’t between us … ”

I’ve never been to Africa, or seen any of these sorts of animals in the wild, and this might be as close as I can get, but it’s difficult not to be humbled by the power of a lion’s roar.

You don’t even have to be near him to hear him. In fact, each time we’ve heard Zeus get chatty we’ve been around some other cats. They say, though, that neighbors two miles away can hear him.

An animal trainer in Peru, IN retired from the circus and just put all of his animals — lions, horses, an elephant — in a barn. The cats were kept in circus cages, their manes matted from sitting in their urine and feces. For nine years Zeus and his brother, Thor, lived like this. They could barely walk in 2010 when they came to this rescue, but both recovered well. Thor died a few years ago, but Zeus still rules the place, and he runs all over his great big yard. They say he will lose his patience with visitors, though, and that he’ll let you know when it is time to move on.

You go on this walking tour with a volunteer. It lasts about an hour. Though if you are there when it is slow, as we were last Thanksgiving, they will walk you through as slowly as you like. Our volunteer on this trip was a lady who works here when she’s not volunteering at a humane shelter. She’s very pleased and excited about doing all of this, as you might imagine, though some of it involves continually telling people to step back fro the fence. Which is a good idea because, while chain link is a useful invention, it would just serve to slow down a properly motivated tiger. That fence gives you a little head start and a false sense of security, that’s all.

This is Beaux. He’s not an albino, it’s just an exceedingly rare genetic trait. It seems that research points back to one particular line for all of the white cats in the U.S. Three of them live here. And, like a lot of the cats here, he has a ridiculous story.

Beaux arrived, at 14 months old, in 2016. A preacher in Virginia took in unwanted tigers from the circus and used them … to teach Sunday school. Three tigers came to this rescue when the preacher’s health began to fail him.

Beaux was pacing around because as we walked the one way, his friends, the people who are feeding the cats, were working their way toward us. Beaux was hungry, and it was quite something to see all of the cats get fed.

Just as hearing a lion roar is a humbling experience, hearing these powerful jaws snap bones is another reason to glance down to make sure your shoelaces are tied … just in case.

Our guide told us about the recent Big Cat Safety Act, which was signed into law in December. Essentially, this law prohibits the private ownership of big cats and makes it illegal for exhibitors to allow direct contact with cubs. The second half of that, once you hear all the details of how those normally work, is a good development. The first part should, effectively reduce the need for large cat refuges in the United States in the next 20 years or so. If people can’t own them, they can’t abuse them, can’t be outgrown by the cats, can’t need to give them to a rescue center. This should be a good thing.

I got in a little ride Saturday morning, before our company arrived. It was just 20 miles, and a little slow, but it felt a lot more comfortable than I did on Wednesday, when I was still recovering from my cold.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 75 routes down, 44 to go.

Time for a quick pass through the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I picked them up, and writing a bit about them here, and I’m well behind. These aren’t reviews, but they can be fun, or prompt some nice memory, or, really, just an excuse to put some music in here.

Which is what we’re doing today, as we do a quick scan through a compilation, Son of Frat Rock that was, I am sure, desperately desired in 1988. This one was part of a trilogy, it seems, and this was the second one, which has some great old tunes, and some fun one-hit wonders. This was a giveaway, I’m sure of it. And I’ve probably listened to the whole thing four or five times. Mostly, it was good for a quick tune here or there. But for the Re-Listening project, everything gets heard.

And this is a good policy because, wouldn’t you know it, there’s some fun stuff on here. This one cracked the top 20 in 1964, and I am only vaguely familiar with it.

The Music Explosion, The Kinks, Tommy James and the Shondells are on the front half of this thing, and then there’s the timeless Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels.

And then Bill Deal & The Rhondels comes on and you think, “that sits at the intersection of doowop and big band, and, thus, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”

Which is silly, that’s blue eyed soul and the beach, and it works.

At which point this huge blind spot in my musical education is unavoidably apparent. (My in-laws will be aghast. I’m going to play them a few of these songs on our next visit, and see how long it takes them to name the groups.)

This one they’ll nail. It isn’t the same on the computer, but in the much-better speakers in my car I found myself thinking, “This is a Rev. Horton Heat song, 30 years too early.”

That’s Ernest Maresca, he was a songwriter first, a record exec second, and then a reluctant singer. He wrote some of Dion’s biggest hits, like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer,” but never thought much of his own singing. That one made it to number six in 1962. He also wrote hits for acts like The Regents, Dean & Jean, Bernadette Carroll and Jimmie Rodgers.

All of which makes part of the experience, here. I’ve had this CD for a quarter century, I’m discovering music almost ready to retire, finding mostly positive things to say about it. And then a song pops up and think, “I see here why we were so ripe for the British Invasion in 64 …”

I’m a generation behind this stuff, and there’s no fault in that, but about half of it was new to me when I picked this up in the late 90s, and some of them still feel new to me, today. Like this cover of a young Stevie Wonder song.

Who knows about The Blendells without using Wikipedia? And when does there music come into the public domain? After running across this in the Re-Listening project I started searching for some of their other stuff, this was a good band. Mexican American brown-eyed soul from the 1960s in East LA. It certainly fits a tunes, probably helped define a place, and there’s still some life in these tunes.

The next song was La Bamba. If I play that here I’ll have to watch the movie again. It’s a rule or something.

Gary U.S. Bonds is 83 and is still playing shows. He’s got one coming up at the end of this week in New York, and that’s worth playing the gold record. He sold a million units of this after it was released in 1961, when it sat atop the charts for two weeks, and here we are, 62 years later … dancing to a quarter to three.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the recorded quality of that song. Accidental, deliberate, whatever it was, the lower fidelity is a signature part of it, at least these days. There are a lot of people trying to do the same sort of thing now.

This is less a gloss over than I intended, but we’re going to make up for it tomorrow, when the Re-Listening project continues with a record that … just wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s for you though. Come back and find out.

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24
Mar 23

‘Here we go again now, here we go again now’

I’m beginning to feel more and more like myself. With every phlegmy cough it feels like the end is around the corner. Except for the coughs that feel like, somehow, the respiratory restrictions in my torso will force the collapse of all known gravity in the universe.

It’s all for show. I do feel a great deal better.

Here are a few more photographs from the Val d’Incles in Andorra. I think you’ll come to lichen them, as I do.

It seems that a good slate roof can last a century. I wonder what all of this weighs. Pity the person who had to lug all that up on top of the building as an apprentice.

Also in that valley, some green stuff growing on the stones that line the single-track road.

If I ever have a long driveway — ours is about 1.25 lengths of a car, which is ideal for snow purposes — I would do a lot of research on how to move in stones and promote moss and lichen growth.

It’d be nice to walk past that on the way to the mailbox, is all.

This, I think, would promote a slow, lingering walk, as opposed to the long, fast strides to and from the mailbox I take right now.

Speak of moving quickly, I am well behind on the Re-Listening project. This, you’ll recall, is the game where I am playing CDs in my car in the order in which I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, but a chance to enjoy some music, think fondly on memories and put some of that there.

Only I’m several CDs behind now, so we’ll be playing a bit of catch up over the next several days.

Today, it is the second and final record from The Refreshments. They were an Arizona bar band who signed a deal, got alt radio and MTV airplay and grew bigger, faster, than probably they wanted. Back in the studio, they found themselves butting heads with their label, and a bit with each other. Roger Clyne and the rest of the guys disliked all of this so much they disbanded after “The Bottle & Fresh Horses.” Shame, too, The Refreshments were great and this album is a lot of fun, even still, 26 years later. I got this as a hand-me-down from the campus radio station in the fall of 1997.

It’s funny, the instrumentation is clever and earnest and all of it was forgotten too fast. But we’re Re-Listening. I’m singing along.

In some ways, the whole thing feels like a continuation of Fizzy, Fuzzy. Even the characters narrative arcs were familiar.

And the jangly guitars got dustier and, more … southwestern … somehow.

This character actually is referencing the first record.

I think this is the song where the band decided they didn’t like the label meddling in their work. It just feels off, and the intensity is a little different. This song, or something else, that was an important catalyst in the band calling it quits.

This one is a referential sequel to something from the other album. This was, I think, the first time I’d ever had that happen from one record to the next. It was so novel — still is, I suppose — and gratifying and welcomed.

I remember reading some trade magazine, an article I will never ever find again in our digital age, about this song and how they overlapped. I was sitting in a burger joint, killing time between this and that, and found myself thinking that if I didn’t like them already, I would have had no choice but to appreciate The Refreshments after that.

No one thinks about things like this, but I wonder what would make up the best three-song series to close out a forgotten record. I’m putting these three tacks up for nomination.

They run the gamut in three songs. Just one of the reasons I was sad to hear of the band’s demise soon after. They went from a local opener in 1993 to a headliner in about a year. About a year later they were signed, but they were defunct by 1998. Clyne and Naffah have been playing in a full band as Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers since then, but I still think of The Refreshments first. They’re touring right now. They’re in the Midwest this spring, in fact, but still too far away.

Anyway, after this rush job on the Re-Listening project, I think I am five or six CDs behind. So guess what we’ll spend some time on next week!?

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7
Mar 23

There’s so much here to see and enjoy

I forgot to brag on this sunset from yesterday. My bad, sun. You know that big ball of fusion has been hurt by that oversight all day. And the skyline, poor emotional skyline. I’ll never be able to make it up to the skyline. And my thoughts are also with the remnants of those clouds, wherever they are a day later.

It was one of those sunsets of a fleeting sort. As I left the building I though, Take a picture, forget to post it, and give the clouds and all that some human emotions in a poorly framed joke. But by the time I got to my car, just a block away, and up to the top of the parking deck, that’s what I was left with. But, sun, you made a lovely one yesterday.

Probably today’s, too, though I didn’t have the chance to see it.

After darkness fell we walked over to the IU Auditorium to see the traveling show of Chicago. The old man sitting in front of us, and the younger man sitting behind us each obviously had no knowledge of the play. Their surprise at Ms. Sunshine was delightful.

And the performers were good. But almost everyone on stage looks so young all of a sudden. Indeed, quite a few of the people in this photo are making their national touring debut.

The audio guy had some trouble, but of the sort you’ll forget in a few days. Billy Flynn and Mama Morton and Amos and Roxie and all the rest pressed through and gave us a nice version of the musical. I think this is my third time seeing it.

I wonder which song will be stuck in my head for weeks this time.

Remember those flowers that I noted, last Wednesday, as a trick of winter?

Almost all of them have unwrapped themselves now. It’s quite a site, even at night.

Forty-five days until the bike races and the official arrival of spring, but it is starting to feel as though we’re closer than that.

It is time, once again, for the Tuesday feature that allows me to close some tabs on my browser. Some things are took good to X out of and see them disappear forever. Much better for me to memorialize them here, on the off-chance that one day they’ll come to mind, and I’ll do a good keyword search, find a particular thing, and hope the original link is still active.

It isn’t a long shot, but if the first real step is my coming up with the text from memory it might take two or three ties to find the right page.

But I digress.

I’m a sucker for all of these job interview type pieces you see on CNBC and Forbes and the like. The titles are outstanding click bait — case studies, almost — but every now and then you’ll find something good in the body of the piece.

I’ve helped hundreds of people land 6-figure salaries. These 5 job interview phrases got them hired ‘on the spot’:

Nailing a job interview isn’t just about listing skills and experience directly from your resume. You want to paint a picture of your accomplishments through concrete, detailed examples.

To do that successfully, you must know how to communicate effectively. As a career coach who has helped hundreds of people land six-figure jobs, I’ve found that there are certain words that will get the interviewer to pay attention.

Here are five job interview phrases that will make companies want to hire you on the spot.

An Amazon applicant who Jeff Bezos hired ‘on the spot’ shares 5 ways to ‘instantly impress’ during the job interview:

I started my 12-year career at Google in 2006, where I held positions as chief of staff and executive business partner. Before that, I worked at Amazon as an executive business partner to Jeff Bezos.

After spending so much time with some of the world’s most successful and influential leaders, I learned what to look for in new candidates. In fact, Bezos hired me on the spot after my first interview with him in 2002.

Based on the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted throughout my decades-long career, here are my top tips on how to instantly impress a hiring manager during the job interview.

See what I mean about those titles? SEO bait and plenty of optimistic gold. They’re quite well done. Speaking of …

Why did I even open this one? To see what her side hustle was, of course. How one woman turned a part-time side hustle in her spare room into a gifting company making over $3 million a year:

Put up your hand if you’ve ever stared out your office window, daydreaming about launching one of your imaginative inventions, being your own boss, and getting very rich in the process.

If your hand is firmly raised, then listen up: The fantasy—which you’d be forgiven for thinking is restricted to those in Silicon Valley or movies—is not entirely unrealistic.

London-based Steph Douglas did exactly that when in 2014 she left her job as a branding marketer for EDF Energy to devote herself full-time to …

It’s an online gift company. You can order custom-made care packages and the like.

Finally, I see variations of this idea every spring now, and it is something I’ll try one day when I don’t have neighbors. You can turn your backyard into a biodiversity hot spot:

People have long stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called rurbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves.

And, with that, I am now down to 28 open tabs in my phone’s browser.

I don’t remember how I got the next CD to appear in the Re-Listening project. I don’t even have the liner notes. But I never had those in this case, and I’m sure that’s part of the story, which I’ve forgotten entirely. I assume someone gave it to me, probably a radio station. “Fear” was released in 1991, but the last CD we played was from the first half of the 1997, and this one got added to my collection sometime soon thereafter.

Anyway, this is the first Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I owned, and the only one until the last year or two. “Walk on the Ocean” and “All I Want” seemed to be everywhere on everything. Both made it into the top 20. And, seriously, until looking through Toad’s entire discography just now, I thought they’d been put on multiple records for some reason. They released those and three other songs from “Fear” as singles. Eventually, in 1994, this record went platinum, having peaked at #49 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums.

Of the deep cuts, I always enjoy the “Nightingale Song.”

Sonically, this is an acoustically perfect alt rock song.

The very next track ups the ante.

And, remembering that this was recorded in 1991, they were bringing back the organ before bringing back the organ was cool.

Or, if you want some of the modern live experience, we saw Toad twice in 2022. Somehow I’d always managed to miss their live shows, to my chagrin. They’re now adding dates for this summer, but none yet so close that we’ll be able to see them. At least not yet.

I’d go back to see a bit more of that “confident, laid back urgency,” that the band has been able to mine for decades now. If this was the summer of 1997 for me, this was my first apartment, and I was desperately trying to personify my own version of confident, laid back urgency — failing miserably at that, no doubt. It was that, going to class and filling time while everyone else was out of town. This record, and the next one we’ll hear from on the Re-Listening project, became big, big parts of filling that time.

He said in early March, not at all thinking about the summer ahead.

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1
Mar 23

The final trick of winter is upon us

At last, I noticed the last of the series of winter’s tricks. I’m a few weeks late in the observation, but we’ve now worked through the full sequence. The sun returns. Then you have a random day or two of unseasonably warm weather. We’ve done that too. And now, these guys.

That’s about as low angle as I can get in coat and tie. But when these emerge, from this particular spot, in a bed between the parking lot, the street, and our campus building, that’s the signature trick of winter here. You want it to be spring; just look at these petals …

… but winter isn’t done with us yet. You don’t know when, or why, but winter will be back. This stems from a 2017 observation. Oh, I was fooled that first winter. The next year, I had that in mind. You want to believe the outliers break your way, but outliers don’t always break your way.

One’s a dot, two’s a line and three is the dawning of understanding a pattern. By the time 2019 rolled around I recognized this for what it was. The winter and first flowers of 2019 didn’t fool me. I was, by then, wise to Mother Nature’s tricks.

Thing is, this has been a remarkably mild winter. It got up to 75 today! It makes you want to believe. But winter isn’t done with us yet.

We are 51 days from spring.

Not many people liked this album, apparently, and most of them were wrong. That’s the takeaway from today’s installment of the Re-Listening project. We’re listening to Seven Mary Three’s third studio album, and that puts us in the early summer of 1997.

My roommate and a friend and I saw them in a small venue the year before. It was very much a post-grunge type show. (Moe opened for them. Their bassist did the stage-dive-crowd-surf thing. His giant clodhopping boots were a danger to society.) And the band was continuing down this route, even as “RockCrown” was flirting with the idea of becoming a concept album. It went to number 75 on the Billboard 200. Two singles hit the top 40 on the Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts. But critics kinda panned them and the one-hit wonder jokes started right away.

I liked the record.

This one was just uploaded three weeks ago. It’s a 2008 performance. And the original song isn’t acoustic, but maybe it should have been.

The problem, I think, is that most of the songs on this album aren’t designed for airplay. That doesn’t make a project bad, or even unsuccessful. Maybe everyone had misplaced that concept for a time. But if something sticks in your head for whatever reason, it sticks in your head.

There are a few lyrics from this song that still come to mind unassisted — sitting quietly, working in the yard, walking down a sidewalk, they just float to the surface — all these many years later.

These guys are from Virginia, and using a guitar like this is allowed on that side of the mountains, I guess.

This was always a car CD for me. Windows up or down. Better when moving around at a fashionable speed. And I don’t know if it evokes the desired response, but this song always makes smile.

So it is good to hear all of this in the car. And the next CD has started, to my delight, which means we’ll be Re-Listening here again soon. We’ll be going all the way back to something released in 1991, though I picked it up six years late. I enjoy it every time I listen to it, though. I may listen to it twice. But that’s a topic for another day.

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28
Feb 23

‘Hey kind friend’

I’m in the middle of the three longest days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday will be postscript and epilogue. But yesterday was 10 hours, today was 10 hours and tomorrow is 12 hours. Tonight, tonight I had a bowl of soup for dinner at 9:30.

It isn’t the hardest work in the world, or overly demanding, but the hours do accumulate.

Also, despite my best efforts, no amazing anecdote emerged from the day. No outlandish story, discovery or incredible sequence of events fell into my lap. No astounding coincidence, tale with a surely fabricated punchline or other incredible thing happened. It was a Tuesday, he said, grateful that he did all of the ironing on Monday.

Some things from Mastodon, which is where all the cool kids are now that Twitter is sliding int its news inedible pot of broth.

Saw this on campus today and picked one up.

It’s a getting-on-our-feet first issue, 10 pages. Heavy on design, light on copy, but rich in information.

You wonder about the practical feasibility of research like this. It seems like we should have this and a few verifying elements of research and then, ya know, implement it.

But the corporate bosses don’t read studies like that, I’d bet.

Every time you turn around archeology is discovering a new not-so-small discovery that resets our understanding of what we understand. It says a lot about what we don’t yet understand, and all of the things there are to learn.

If you click through the link, and wait out the preroll ad, there’s a fantastic NPR package here.

I can’t go all the way to Charlottesville for a photo exhibit, but if I was at the University of Virginia, I would definitely spend some time with those displays.

It is once again time to clean up the browser a bit. These are some tabs I’ve been holding on to for … quite a while, as it turns out. Too good to close and never be found again — and bookmarks being a different, quixotic enterprise altogether, I guess — I’m collecting them here.

This one is dated 2021. Is it possible I’ve had it opened for that long?

A self-made millionaire and CEO shares 5 ‘quick tests’ he always uses during job interviews to decide whether to hire:

Having these quick tests in your back pocket helps you make smarter business decisions. Why? Because the more we think about something, the more our minds will try to play tricks on us. We second-guess, we let doubt and fear creep in, we hesitate, we overthink. The purpose of the five tests below is to get past all of that and get back to the truth that you’ve known deep down all along.

This is especially true regarding two of the most important decisions that managers at my company, Compass, make: When to hire someone, and when to pass on them.

All of those will strike you as general, but not incorrect.

I stumbled upon this sometime early last year and thought, “Clearly anyone can do this.”

I just need some canvas. (And paint. And artistic talent.)

This was a much more recent, perhaps realistic, find. Buckwheat chocolate chunk cookies:

I am a chocolate chunk girl all the way because they melt into the cookie so much better. In contrast, chocolate chips hold their chip shape even after they are baked due to their waxy coating. I also love the size variation that the chunks give. This recipe also doesn’t make you choose between milk chocolate or dark chocolate because it has both! The inner kid in me loves milk chocolate way too much to leave it out, and I think the sweetness balances out the bitterness from the dark chocolate perfectly. Always use good-quality chocolate — especially when it is the star ingredient.

This recipe yields a slightly thin cookie with the crispiest golden edges and a gooey center — just how a chocolate chip cookie should be! It calls for mostly all-purpose flour, with a touch of buckwheat flour. This addition adds a delicate texture and a hint of nuttiness. Lastly, a finish of flaky salt on top adds the perfect amount of crunch. Flaked salt just makes everything better — what can I say?

Say “Pass the cookies, please!”

Because of an impulsive decision to close some shopping sites, a decision no doubt brought on by a distinct lack of cookies available as of this writing, I am now down to just 30 tabs on my phone’s browser.

Today we also return to the Re-Listening project, which is where I’m working my way through all of my CDs, in order of acquisition. Not reviews, but sometimes memories, and most often an excuse to revisit music — most of it great!

This installment brings us to the late spring or early summer of 1997. I bought my second Indigo Girls CD. The first was the double-live “1200 Curfews,” this was a studio record, and “Shaming of the Sun” solidified my love for the band. I saw them that May and, thanks to the web, I can see the setlist.

Thin Line
Power of Two
Don’t Give That Girl a Gun
It’s Alright
Shed Your Skin
Get Out the Map
Reunion
Mystery
Scooter Boys
Everything in Its Own Time
Shame on You
Caramia
Chickenman
Southland in the Springtime
Cut It Out
Galileo
Chiapas Bound
Here I Am
Closer to Fine

Nine of those songs are on this record. I wish I could remember if I’d already bought it by then. Probably so. (I also saw them the next year, in Atlanta. I’ve seen the Indigo Girls more than anyone else, I imagine, and almost always as a two-piece.) It became their highest-charting album, at least in the United States. It hit number 7 on the Billboard 200.

The most important memories from this record would come still a decade later. The first two tracks are songs The Yankee and I sang together on a long car ride.

This is important because I don’t really sing in front of people, or sing with people outside of church. But it had been a good week and the sun was bright and the road was long and we were actually using an actual map.

Sometime later she made me a mix CD and that song is on there, too. We’ve also seen the Indigo Girls together twice, in Atlanta and Indianapolis. But for Covid, we would have seen them in Nashville too, just to round out the map a bit more.

The still-intriguing thing about this record is that it still fits at any time. Also, there’s a lot of message music on here. Protests and the like have never especially appealed to me, or sent me away, but the messaging is obvious, even to me. When I first got this I was still mostly taken by Emily Saliers’ incredible writing, even as I was starting to pay more attention to Amy Ray’s background vocals.

It was the next record when I would really learn to dive into everything Ray did. They compliment one another so well, of course. At the time, what Saliers wrote, the way she played, it all felt so true and intently earnest. And sometimes brooding and mysterious.

I just wasn’t hearing Ray yet, which seems hilarious in retrospect. (I have her entire catalog now, and I’ll ramble on and on about it in future installments, I’m sure of it.)

Those harmonies!

That’s why you sing along with a pretty girl, even if you’re not in the habit of making such a small thing about yourself available.